Gertrude Bell Elion (1918 - 1999)

Gertrude Elion is known for discovering many medications, including medications for HIV/AIDS, herpes, immunity disorders, and leukemia. She and her colleague George H. Hitchings were awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1988. Elion graduated from Hunter College in 1937 with a degree in chemistry and New York University (M.Sc.) in 1941, while working as a high school teacher during day time. Her fifteen fellowship applications were turned down due to gender bias at the time, so she enrolled in a secretarial school, which lasted six weeks before she found a job. Unable to obtain a graduate research position, she worked as a food quality supervisor at A&P supermarkets and for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Later, she left to work as an assistant to George H. Hitchings at the Burroughs-Wellcome pharmaceutical company in Tuckahoe, New York (now GlaxoSmithKline). Hitchings was using a new way of developing drugs, by imitating natural compounds instead of through trial and error. He believed that if he could trick cancer cells into accepting artificial compounds for growth, they could be destroyed without also destroying normal cells.She began to work with purines, and in 1950, she developed the anti-cancer drugs tioguanine and 6-MP. She began to go to night school at New York University Tandon School of Engineering (then Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute), but after several years of long range commuting, she was informed that she would no longer be able to continue her doctorate on a part-time basis, but would need to give up her job and go to school full-time. Elion made what was then a critical decision in her life, to stay with her job and give up the pursuit of a doctorate. She never obtained a formal Ph.D., but was later awarded an honorary Ph.D from New York University Tandon School of Engineering (then Polytechnic University of New York) in 1989 and honorary SD degree from Harvard university in 1998. Source: Wikipedia

Known for
Working alone as well as with Hitchings and Black, Elion developed a multitude of new drugs, using innovative research methods that would later lead to the development of the AIDS drug AZT.

She developed the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used for organ transplants.

She also developed the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), for the treatment of Herpes infection.

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MacBain, Jenny (2004). Gertrude Elion : Nobel prize winner in physiology and medicine.